Joseph Masco - Survival is Your Business-1

CA“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS”: Engineering Ruinsand Affect in Nuclear America

JOSEPH MASCOUniversity of Chicago

Has any nation-state invested as profoundly in ruins as Cold War America?Although many societies have experienced moments of self-doubt about the future,perhaps even contemplating the ruins that might be left behind as testament totheir existence, it took American ingenuity to transform ruination into a form ofnation-building. In this regard, the invention of the atomic bomb proved to beutterly transformative for the United States: it not only provided the inspirationfor a new U.S. geopolitical strategy—one that quickly enveloped the earth inadvanced military technology and colonized everyday life with the minute-to-minute possibility of nuclear war. The bomb also provided officials with a newmeans of engaging and disciplining citizens in everyday life. For U.S. policymakers,the Cold War arms race transformed the apocalypse into a technoscientific projectand a geopolitical paradigm, but also a powerful new domestic political resource.

Put differently, a new kind of social contract was formed in the first decade ofthe nuclear age in the United States, one based not on the protection and improve-ment of everyday life but, rather, on the national contemplation of ruins. Knowninitially as “civil defense,” the project of building the bomb and communicating itspower to the world, turned engineering ruins into a form of (inter)national the-ater. Nuclear explosions matched with large-scale emergency response exercisesbecame a means of developing the bomb as well as imagining nuclear warfare (e.g.,see Glasstone and Dolan 1977; Kahn 1960; Vanderbilt 2002). This “test program”would ultimately transform the United States into the most nuclear-bombed coun-try on earth, distributing its environmental, economic, and health effects to eachand every U.S. citizen.1 By the mid-1950s it was no longer a perverse exerciseCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 23, Issue 2, pp. 361–398. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C© 2008 bythe American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1525/can.2008.23.2.361.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 23:2

to imagine one’s own home and city devastated, on fire, and in ruins; it was aformidable public ritual—a core act of governance, technoscientific practice, anddemocratic participation. Indeed, in the early Cold War United States, it becamea civic obligation to collectively imagine, and at times theatrically enact through“civil defense,” the physical destruction of the nation-state.2

It is this specific nationalization of death that I wish to explore in this article,assessing not only the first collective formulations of nuclear fear in the UnitedStates but also the residues and legacies of that project for contemporary Americansociety. For today, we live in a world populated with newly charred landscapes and aproduction of ruins that speaks directly to this foundational moment in U.S. nationalculture (see Stoler with Bond 2006). The notions of preemption and emergencyresponse that inform the George W. Bush administration’s “war on terror” derivemeaning from the promises and institutions built by the Cold War security state.Indeed, the logics of nuclear fear informing that multigenerational state and nation-building enterprise exist now as a largely inchoate, but deeply embedded, set ofassumptions about power and threat. How Americans have come to understandmass death at home and abroad, I argue, has much to do with the legacies of the ColdWar nuclear project, and the peculiar psychosocial consequences of attempting tobuild the nation through the contemplation of nuclear ruins.

What follows is largely a study of visual culture, and specifically, of the do-mestic deployment of images of a ruined United States for ideological effect. Iargue that key aspects of U.S. security culture have been formed in relation toimages of nuclear devastation: the constitution of the modern security state inthe aftermath of World War II mobilized the atomic bomb as the basis for U.S.geopolitical power, but it also created a new citizen–state relationship mediated bynuclear fear. In this article, I consider the lasting effects of nation-building throughnuclear fear by tracking the production and ongoing circulation of nuclear ruinsfrom the Cold War’s “balance of terror” through the current “war on terror.”It is not an exercise in viewer response but, rather, charts the development andcirculation of a specific set of ideas and images about nuclear war. I begin with adiscussion of the early Cold War project known as “civil defense” and then trackhow the specific images created for domestic consumption as part of that campaigncontinued to circulate as afterimages in the popular films of the 1980s and 1990sand inform contemporary security culture.3 I show that the early Cold War statesought explicitly to militarize U.S. citizens through contemplating the end of thenation-state, creating in the process a specific set of ideas and images of collectivedanger that continue to inform American society in powerful and increasingly

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“SURVIVAL IS YOUR BUSINESS”

complex ways. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washing-ton, D.C., on September 11, 2001, the affective coordinates of the Cold War armsrace provided specific ideological resources to the state, which once again mobilizedthe image of a United States in nuclear ruins to enable war. Ultimately, this articlefollows Walter Benjamin’s (1969:242) call to interrogate the aestheticized politicsthat enable increasing militarization and that allow citizens to experience their owndestruction as an “aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”4

BE AFRAID BUT DON’T PANIC!

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. . . . Tothink the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as wesuspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in whichto think it.

—Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster

Nuclear ruins are never the end of the story in the United States but, rather,always offer a new beginning. In the early Cold War period, ruins become themarkers of a new kind of social intimacy grounded in highly detailed renderingsof theatrically rehearsed mass violence. The intent of these public spectacles—nuclear detonations, city evacuations, and duck and cover drills—was not defensein the classic sense of avoiding violence or destruction but rather a psychologicalreprogramming of the U.S. public for life in a nuclear age. The central project of theearly nuclear state was to link U.S. institutions—military, industrial, legislative, andacademic—for the production of the bomb, while calibrating public perceptionsof the nuclear danger to enable that project.5 As Blanchot (1995) suggests, thiseffort to think through the disaster colonized everyday life as well as the future,while fundamentally missing the actual disaster. The scripting of disaster in theimagination has profound social effects: it defines the conditions of insecurity,renders other threats invisible, and articulates the terms of both value and loss. Inthe United States, civil defense was always a willful act of fabulation, an officialfantasy designed to promote an image of nuclear war that would be, above allthings, politically useful. It also installed an idea of an American community undertotal and unending threat, creating the terms for a new kind of nation-building thatdemanded an unprecedented level of militarism in everyday life as the minimumbasis for “security.”

After the Soviet’s first nuclear detonation in 1949, U.S. policymakers com-mitted to a new geopolitical strategy that would ultimately dominate U.S. foreignpolicy for the remainder of the 20th century. The policy of “containment,” as

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formalized in National Security Council 68 (known as NSC 68), proposed, in re-sponse to the Soviet bomb, a total mobilization of American society based on theexperience of WWII.6 NSC 68 articulates the terms of a permanent wartime pos-ture funded by an ever-expanding domestic economy, transforming consumerisminto the engine of a new kind of militarized geopolitics. NSC 68 identifies internaldissent as perhaps the greatest threat to the project of “Cold War” and calls for anew campaign to discipline citizens for life under the constant shadow of nuclearwar. Thus, in Washington, D.C., nuclear fear was immediately understood notonly to be the basis of U.S. military power, but also a means of installing a newnormative reality within the United States, one that could consolidate politicalpower at the federal level. The nuclear danger became a complex new politicalideology, both mobilizing the global project of Cold War (fought increasingly oncovert terms) and installing a powerful means of controlling domestic politicaldebates over the terms of security. By focusing Americans on an imminent end ofthe nation-state, federal authorities mobilized the bomb to create the “Cold Warconsensus” of anticommunism, capitalism, and military expansion.

NSC 68 is a classified policy document written in 1950 by the National Security Council for

President Harry S. Truman, which articulates the policy of Soviet “containment” as well as the domestic

terms of fighting a “Cold War”:

On the Soviet Threat:The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new

fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over therest of the world. Conflict has, therefore, become endemic and is waged, on the part ofthe Soviet Union, by violent or non-violent methods in accordance with the dictates ofexpediency. With the development of increasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction,every individual faces the ever-present possibility of annihilation should the conflict enterthe phase of total war. . ..

No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours, so implacable in its purposeto destroy ours, so capable of turning to its own uses the most dangerous and divisive trendsin our own society, no other so skillfully and powerfully evokes the elements of irrationalityin human nature everywhere, and no other has the support of a great and growing center ofmilitary power. . ..

In a shrinking world, which now faces the threat of atomic warfare, it is not anadequate objective merely to seek to check the Kremlin design, for the absence of orderamong nations is becoming less and less tolerable. This fact imposes on us, in our owninterests, the responsibility of world leadership.

On containment:As for the policy of “containment,” it is one which seeks by all means short of war to

(1) block further expansion of Soviet power, (2) expose the falsities of Soviet pretensions,

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(3) induce a retraction of the Kremlin’s control and influence and (4) in general, so fosterthe seeds of destruction within the Soviet system that the Kremlin is brought at least to thepoint of modifying its behavior to conform to generally accepted international standards.It was and continues to be cardinal in this policy that we possess superior overall power inourselves or in dependable combination with other like-minded nations. One of the mostimportant ingredients of power is military strength. . . .Without superior aggregate militarystrength, in being and readily mobilizable, a policy of “containment”—which is in effect apolicy of calculated and gradual coercion—is no more than a policy of bluff.

On the problem of internal dissent:The democratic way is harder than the authoritarian way because, in seeking to

protect and fulfill the individual, it demands of him understanding, judgment and positiveparticipation in the increasingly complex and exacting problems of the modern world. Itdemands that he exercise discrimination; that while pursuing through free inquiry the searchfor truth he knows when he should commit an act of faith; that he distinguish between thenecessity for tolerance and the necessity for just suppression. A free society is vulnerablein that it is easy for people to lapse into excesses—the excess of a permanently open mindwishfully waiting for evidence that evil design may become noble purpose, the excess offaith becoming prejudice, the excess of tolerance degenerating into indulgence of conspiracyand the excess of resorting to suppression when more moderate measures are not only moreappropriate but more effective.

On economic military expansion:One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the

American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provideenormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneouslyproviding a high standard of living. . . .This provides an opportunity for the United States, incooperation with other free countries, to launch a build-up of strength which will support afirm policy directed to the frustration of the Kremlin design.

On the project of Cold War:In summary, we must, by means of a rapid and sustained build-up of the political,

economic, and military strength of the free world, and by means of an affirmative programintended to wrest the initiative from the Soviet Union, confront it with convincing evidenceof the determination and ability of the free world to frustrate the Kremlin design of aworld dominated by its will. Such evidence is the only means short of war which eventuallymay force the Kremlin to abandon its present course of action and to negotiate acceptableagreements on issues of major importance. The whole success of the proposed program hangsultimately on recognition by this Government, the American people, and all free peoples,that the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.

(The full original text is available at the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum,http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/korea/large/week2/nsc68_

55.htm, accessed November 15, 2007.)

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Defense intellectuals within the Truman and Eisenhower administrations,however, worried that nuclear terror could become so profound under the termsof an escalating nuclear arms race that the American public would be unwillingto support the military and geopolitical agenda of the Cold War.7 The immediatechallenge, as U.S. nuclear strategists saw it, was to avoid an apathetic public (whichmight just give up when faced with the destructive power of the Soviet nucleararsenal), on the one hand, or a terrorized public (unable to function cognitively), onthe other hand (Oakes 1994:34; and also George 2003). For example, an influentialcivil defense study from 1952, Project East River, argued that civilian response toa nuclear attack would be all-out panic and mob behavior: American society, itconcluded, would not only be at war with the Soviets but also at war with itselfas society violently broke down along race and class lines (Associated Universities1952). A long “Cold War” consequently required not only a new geopoliticspowered by nuclear weapons but also new forms of psychological discipline athome. One of the earliest and most profound projects of the Cold War state wasthus to deploy the bomb as a mechanism for accessing and controlling the emotionsof citizens.

As Guy Oakes has documented (1994:47), the civil defense programs of theearly Cold War were designed to “emotionally manage” U.S. citizens throughnuclear fear. The formal goal of this state program was to transform “nuclearterror,” which was interpreted by U.S. officials as a paralyzing emotion, into“nuclear fear,” an affective state that would allow citizens to function in a timeof crisis (see Associated Universities 1952, as well as Oakes 1994:62–63). Bymilitarizing everyday life through nuclear fear, the Cold War state sought to bothnormalize and politically deploy an image of catastrophic risk. Rather than offeringcitizens an image of safety or of a war that could end in victory, the early Cold Warstate sought instead to calibrate everyday American life to the minute-to-minutepossibility of nuclear warfare. In addition to turning the domestic space of the homeinto the front line of the Cold War, civil defense argued that citizens should beprepared every second of the day to deal with a potential nuclear attack. In doing so,the Civil Defense Program shifted responsibility for nuclear war from the state toits citizens by making public panic the enemy, not nuclear war itself. It was, in otherwords, up to citizens to take responsibility for their own survival in the nuclear age.As Val Peterson, the first head of the U.S. Civil Defense Administration, argued in1953:

Ninety per cent of all emergency measures after an atomic blast will dependon the prevention of panic among the survivors in the first 90 seconds. Like

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the A-bomb, panic is fissionable. It can produce a chain reaction more deeplydestructive than any explosive known. If there is an ultimate weapon, it maywell be mass panic—not the A-bomb.

Panic is fissionable. This idea that emotional self-regulation was the single mostimportant issue during a nuclear attack (not to mention the 90-second window onsuccess or failure), sought quite formally to turn all Americans into docile bodiesthat would automatically support the goals of the security state. Civil defenseplanners sought ultimately to saturate the public space with a specific idea aboutnuclear war, one that would nationalize mass death and transform postnuclear ruinsinto a new American frontier, simply another arena for citizens to assert their civicspirit and ingenuity. At the heart of the project was an effort to install psychologicaldefenses against the exploding bomb, as well as a belief in the possibility ofnational unity in a postnuclear environment—all via the contemplation of nuclearruins.

Indeed, as the Eisenhower administration promoted an idea of “Atoms forPeace” around the world to emphasize the benefits of nuclear energy and providea positive face to atomic science, it pursued an opposite emotional managementstrategy within the United States (Craig 1998; Hewlett and Holl 1989; Osgood2006). The domestic solution to the Soviet nuclear arsenal was a new kind ofsocial-engineering project, pursued with help from the advertising industry, toteach citizens a specific kind of nuclear fear while normalizing the nuclear crisis.The goal, as one top-secret study put it in 1956, was an “emotional adaptation” of thecitizenry to nuclear crisis, a program of “psychological defense” aimed at “feelings”that would unify the nation in the face of apocalyptic everyday threat.8 This took theform of the largest domestic propaganda campaign to date in U.S. history.9 Designedto mobilize all Americans for a long Cold War, the civil defense effort involvedtown meetings and education programs in every public school; it also sought totake full advantage of mass media—television, radio, and, particularly, film. By themid-1950s, the Federal Civil Defense Agency (FCDA) saturated newspapers andmagazines with nuclear war planning advertisements and could claim that its radiobroadcasts reached an estimated audience of 175 million Americans per year.

As the campaign evolved, the FCDA turned increasingly to film, creating alibrary of short subjects on nuclear destruction and civil defense that was shownacross the country in schools, churches, community halls, and movie theaters.The FCDA concluded in 1955 that “each picture will be seen by a minimum of20,000,000 persons, giving an anticipated aggregate audience of more than half a

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billion for the civil defense film program of 1955” (1956:78). A key to winning theCold War was producing the bomb not only for military use but also in cinematicform for the American public. It is important to recognize that the circulationof these images relied on a simultaneous censorship of images from the atomicbombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. U.S. authorities made availableimages of destroyed buildings from Japan but withheld the detailed effects ofthe atomic bomb on the human body, as well as some firsthand accounts of theaftermath.10 An immediate project of the nuclear state was thus to calibrate theimage of atomic warfare for the American public through the mass circulation ofcertain images of the bomb and the censorship of all others. In this way, officialssought to mobilize the power of mass media to transform nuclear attack from anunthinkable apocalypse into an opportunity for psychological self-management,civic responsibility, and ultimately, governance. Civil defense ultimately sought toproduce an “atomic bomb proof” society in which nuclear conflict was normalizedalong side all other threats, making public support for the Cold War sustainable.

Civil defense theorists argued that citizens could only achieve this contradic-tory state of productive fear (simultaneously mobilized and normalized) by gainingintimacy with nuclear warfare itself, by becoming familiar with language of nucleareffects from blast, heat, and fire to radioactive fallout. As RAND analyst I. I. Janisput it, the goal of civil defense was ultimately an “emotional inoculation” of the U.S.public (1951:220). This inoculation, he cautioned, needed to be finely calibrated:the simulated nuclear destruction in civil defense exercises, as well as the atomictest film footage released to the public, had to be formidable enough to mobilizecitizens but not so terrifying as to invalidate the concept of defense altogether (adistinct challenge in an age of increasingly powerful thermonuclear weapons whichoffered no hope of survival to most urban residents). A central project of civildefense was thus to produce fear but not terror, anxiety but not panic, to informabout nuclear science but not fully educate about nuclear war. The microregula-tion of a nation community at the emotional level was the goal. Put differently,alongside the invention of a new security state grounded in nuclear weapons camea new public culture of insecurity in the United States: figuring the United Statesas global nuclear superpower was coterminous with a domestic campaign to revealthe United States as completely vulnerable, creating a citizen–state relationshipincreasingly mediated by forms of inchoate but ever present nuclear fear.

Indeed, one of the first U.S. civil defense projects of the Cold War was tomake every U.S. city a target, and every U.S. citizen a potential victim of nuclearattack. The FCDA circulated increasingly detailed maps of the likely targets of a

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FIGURE 1. Map of presumed Soviet nuclear targets in 1955 (Federal Civil DefenseAdministration).

Soviet nuclear attack through the 1950s, listing the cities in order of populationand ranking them as potential targets. In one 1955 FCDA map (see Figure 1), thetop 70 Soviet targets include major population centers as well as military bases inthe United States—revealing not only the vulnerability of large cities to the bombbut also the increasingly wide distribution of military industrial sites across thecontinental United States. As the size of U.S. and Soviet bombs, and the meansof delivery, grew (from bombers to intercontinental ballistic missiles [ICBMs]), sotoo did the highly publicized target lists. Thomas J. Martin and Donald C. Latham’s1963 civil defense textbook, Strategy for Survival, for example, presented a case for303 ground zeros in the United States in case of nuclear war. Designating 303 U.S.cities and towns that would be likely targets of nuclear attack, they concluded that:

No one can predict that any one or combination of these cities would beattacked in any future war. Thus, it might appear that we are trying to knowthe unknowable, to predict the unpredictable, to impose a logical rationaleupon war which is, itself, illogical and irrational. But such an inference isincorrect. It was shown in Chapter 5 that there are good reasons to believethat a large fraction of these cities would be attacked in a future war—but whatspecific cities would be included in this fraction? Because there is no preciseanswer to this question, civil defense planning must assume that all could

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be potential targets. Any other approach is thermonuclear Russian Rouletteplayed with 100 million American lives. [Martin and Latham 1963:182]

Thermonuclear Russian Roulette. Marking every population center with over 50,000people a likely target, Martin and Latham saw no “safe” area in the UnitedStates. From New York to Topeka, from Los Angeles to Waco, from Albu-querque to Anchorage—each community could increasingly argue that it was a“first strike” target of Soviet attack. Indeed, citizens were informed from multiplemedia sources that their community—indeed, their very living room—was theliteral front line of the Cold War, with Soviet thermonuclear warheads poised toattack.11

From 1953 to 1961, the yearly centerpiece of the civil defense program was asimulated nuclear attack on the United States directed by federal authorities.12 Citieswere designated as victims of nuclear warfare, allowing civic leaders and politiciansto lead theatrical evacuations of the city for television cameras, followed by mediadiscussions of blast damage versus fire damage versus fallout, and the expectedcasualty rates if the attack had been “real.” In 1955, for example, the “OperationAlert” scenario involved 60 cities hit by a variety of atomic and hydrogen bombs,producing over 8 million instant deaths and another 8 million radiation victimsover the coming weeks (see Figure 2). It imagined 25 million homeless and falloutcovering some 63,000 square miles of the United States (FCDA 1956, and alsoKrugler 2006:126). Each year Americans acted out their own incineration in thismanner, with public officials cheerfully evacuating cities and evaluating emergencyplanning, while nuclear detonations in Nevada and the South Pacific provided newimages of fireballs and mushroom clouds to reinforce the concept of imminentnuclear threat. The early Cold War state sought to install a specific idea of thebomb in the American imagination through these public spectacles, creating anew psychosocial space caught between the utopian promise of U.S. technoscienceand the minute-to-minute threat of thermonuclear incineration. It sought to makemass death an intimate psychological experience while simultaneously claimingthat thermonuclear war could be planned for alongside tornados, floods, and trafficaccidents. Civil defense ultimately sought to make nuclear war a space of nation-building, and thereby bring this new form of death under the control of the state.

Here is how one of the most widely circulated U.S. Civil Defense films of the1950s, Let’s Face It, described the problem posed by nuclear warfare:

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FIGURE 2. Simulated nuclear attack pattern from 1955 Operation Alert exercise (Federal CivilDefense Administration).

The tremendous effects of heat and blast on modern structures raise importantquestions concerning their durability and safety. Likewise, the amount ofdamage done to our industrial potential will have a serious effect upon ourability to recover from an atomic attack. Transportation facilities are vitalto a modern city. The nation’s lifeblood could be cut if its traffic arterieswere severed. These questions are of great interest not only to citizens inmetropolitan centers but also to those in rural areas who may be in a dangerzone because of radioactive fallout from today’s larger weapons. We couldget many of the answers to these questions by constructing a complete city atour Nevada Proving Ground and then exploding a nuclear bomb over it. Wecould study the effects of damage over a wide area, under all conditions, andplan civil defense activities accordingly. But such a gigantic undertaking is notfeasible.

The problem voiced here is ultimately one of scientific detail: how can thesecurity state prepare to survive a nuclear attack if it does not know precisely howevery aspect of American life would respond to both the effects of the bomb andthe resulting social confusion? But after denying the possibility of building an entirecity in Nevada simply to destroy it, the narrator of Let’s Face It reveals that thenuclear state has, in fact, done just that:

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Instead we build representative units of a test city. With steel and stone andbrick and mortar, with precision and skill—as though it were to last a thousandyears. But it is a weird, fantastic city. A creation right out of science fiction.A city like no other on the face of the earth. Homes, neat and clean andcompletely furnished, that will never be occupied. Bridges, massive girders ofsteel spanning the empty desert. Railway tracks that lead to nowhere, for thisis the end of the line. But every element of these tests is carefully planned inthese tests as to its design and location in the area. A variety of materials andbuilding techniques are often represented in a single structure. Every brick,beam, and board will have its story to tell. When pieced together these willgive some of the answers, and some of the information we need to survive in thenuclear age.

A weird, fantastic city. This test city was also an idealized model of the contemporaryAmerican suburb, and by publicizing its atomic destruction the state was involved inan explicit act of psychological manipulation. As we shall see, the Nevada Test Sitewas the location of nuclear war “simulations” involving real nuclear explosions, andmodel American cities destroyed in real time for a national audience. Each ruin inthese national melodramas—each element of bombed U.S. material culture—waspresented as a key to solving the “problem” of nuclear warfare, a means of crackingthe code for survival in nuclear conflict. But in this effort to control a specific ideaof death, the civil defense strategy also forced citizens to confront the logics ofthe nuclear state, allowing many to reclaim and reinvest these same ruins witha counternarrative and critique.13 Thus, real and imagined nuclear ruins becamethe foundation for competing ideas of national community, producing resistanceto, as well as normalization of, a militarized society. But, although the early ColdWar effort to produce an “atomic bomb proof” society may have failed, as we shallsee, the psychosocial legacies of this moment continue to haunt and inform U.S.national culture.14 In the remainder of this article, I offer a visual history of nuclearruins in the United States as a means both of recovering the affective coordinatesof the nuclear security state, and exploring the lasting impacts of the Cold War“emotional management” strategy on American society.

“CUE FOR SURVIVAL”

On May 5, 1955, 100 million Americans watched live on television a “typical”suburban community blown to bits by an atomic bomb (see FCDA 1955 and1956). Many watched from homes and apartments that were the explicit models

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for the test city, and saw mannequin families posed in casual everyday moments (atthe kitchen table, on the couch, in bed—or watching TV) experience the atomicblast. “Operation Cue” was the largest of the civil defense spectacles staged at theNevada Test Site: it promised not only to demonstrate the power of the explodingbomb but also to show citizens exactly what a postnuclear American city wouldlook like. In addition to the live television coverage, film footage was widelydistributed in the years after the test, with versions shown in movie theaters andreplayed on television. Some of the most powerful and enduring U.S. images ofatomic destruction were crafted during Operation Cue and remain in circulationto this day. Thus, in important ways, the broken buildings and charred rubbleproduced in Operation Cue continue to structure contemporary U.S. perceptionsof postnuclear ruins, constituting a kind of ur-text for the nuclear age.

As an experiment, Operation Cue was designed to test residences, shelterdesigns, utilities, mobile housing, vehicles, warning systems, as well as a variety ofdomestic items, under atomic blast. Linked to each of these objects was a specifictest program and research team drawn from Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, theAtomic Energy Commission and the FCDA. A variety of FCDA exercises wereconducted in the aftermath of the explosion as well, including rescue operations, firecontrol, plane evacuations, communication and sanitation efforts, and mass feeding.The test city was designed as a “representative” American community, and was madeup of a variety of current building styles (ramblers, two-story brick houses, as well astrailers and mobile homes), a variety of utilities (from electronic towers to propanesystems), numerous bomb shelter designs, as well as efforts to protect records (i.e.,a variety of office safes). Over 150 industrial associations participated in the test,insuring that the very latest consumer items from cars to furniture, clothing todishware, televisions to radio, were installed in the brand new houses. Hundredsof civilian participants were invited to inhabit not the pristine pretest city but theposttest atomic ruins: civilians were simultaneously witnesses and test subjects,serving as representative “Americans” and individuals to be tested by viewingthe blast and participating in mass feeding and emergency operations. The formalinhabitants of Operation Cue were the mannequin families, dressed and theatricallyposed to suggest everyday life activities, communicating through their posture anddress that the bombing was an unexpected intrusion into an intimate home space(see Figure 3).

Operation Cue was designed to appeal to a domestic audience, and particularlyto women.15 Unlike previous civil defense films, Operation Cue (FCDA 1955,15 minutes) has a female narrator—Joan Collins—who promises to see the test

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FIGURE 3. Mannequins used in Operation Cue (Federal Civil Defense Administration).

“through my own eyes and the eye of the average citizen.” In its effort to producea “bomb proof” society, the FCDA was concerned with documenting the effectsof the bomb against every detail of middle-class, white, suburban life. The mediastrategy involved recalibrating domestic life by turning the nuclear family into anuclearized family, preprogrammed for life before, during, and after a nuclear war.Gender roles were reinforced by dividing up responsibility for food and securityin a time of nuclear crisis between women and men. Similarly, the civil defensecampaigns in public schools were designed to deploy children to educate theirparents about civil defense. Normative gender roles were used to reinforce theidea that nuclear crisis was not an exceptional condition but one that could beincorporated into everyday life with minor changes in household technique and a“can do” American spirit.

Of particular concern in Operation Cue, for example, were food tests andmass feeding programs. In each of the model homes, the pantries and refrigeratorswere stocked with food. In her voiceover, Collins underscores the Operation Cue’saddress to women, announcing: “As a mother and housewife, I was particularlyinterested in the food test program, a test that included canned and packagedfood.” Additionally, food in various forms of packaging was buried along thedesert test site, to expose it to radiation, and some of the mannequin familieswere posed to be involved in food preparation at the time of the detonation.Conceptually, the argument was that at any moment of the day—while enjoyingone’s breakfast for example—the bomb could drop. The FCDA sought, as McEaneyargues (2000:109), to create a “paramilitary housewife,” emotionally and materiallyin control of her home and thinking about postnuclear social life. Formally, the

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FCDA was interested in whether or not food would be too contaminated inthe immediate aftermath of a blast to eat, and also what kinds of techniqueswould be needed to feed large groups of homeless, injured, and traumatizedpeople. Within this scheme of crisis management, food was positioned as a primarymeans of calming individual anxieties and establishing social authority (McEaney2000:111). Informally, the goal was to saturate the domestic space of the homewith nuclear logics and civic obligations, to militarize men, women, and childrento withstand either a very long nuclear confrontation or a very short nuclear war.

Food was flown in from Las Vegas, Chicago, and San Francisco for the test todocument the state’s ability to move large quantities of food around the countryin a time of “emergency.” The FCDA report, “Project 32.5: Effects of NuclearExplosions on Frozen Food,” concludes that “under emergency conditions similarto this exposure, frozen foods may be used for both military and civilian feeding”(Schmitt 1956:3) but this conclusion only hints at the scale of this experiment.Frozen chicken potpies were a privileged test item and were distributed throughthe test homes as well as buried in bulk freezers. The pies were then exposed tonuclear blast and tested for radiation, as well as nutritional value, color, and taste.Thus, while building increasing powerful atomic and thermonuclear weapons,the security state set about demonstrating to Americans that even if the nation-state disappeared under nuclear fire, its newly developed prepared foods wouldstill be edible (making the chicken potpie a curious emblem of modernity in theprocess). Like these bomb-proof potpies, all commodified aspects of American lifewere to be tested against nuclear blast, as the state sought to demonstrate notonly that there could be a “postnuclear” moment, but that life within it could beimagined on largely familiar terms.

Indeed, documenting evidence of material survival after the atomic blast wasultimately the point of Operation Cue. The mass feeding project, for example,pulled equipment from the wreckage after the test, as well as the food fromrefrigerators and buried canned goods, and served them to assembled participants:this emergency meal consisted of roast beef, tomato juice, baked beans, and coffee(FDCA 1955:67). The destruction of a model American community thus becamethe occasion of a giant picnic, with each item of food marked as having survived theatomic bomb, and each witness positioned as a postnuclear survivor. Additionally,the emergency rescue group pulled damaged mannequins from out of the rubbleand practiced medical and evacuation techniques on them, eventually flying severalcharred and broken dummies to offsite hospitals by charter plane. The formalmessage of Operation Cue was that the postnuclear environment would be only as

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chaotic as citizens allowed, that resources (food, shelter, and medical) would stillbe present, and that society—if not the nation-state—would continue. Nuclearwar was ultimately presented as a state of mind that could be incorporated into onesnormative reality—it was simply a matter of emotional preparation and mentaldiscipline.

The mannequin families that were intact after the explosion were soon on anational tour, complete with tattered and scorched clothing. J. C. Penney’s De-partment store, which provided the garments, displayed these postnuclear familiesin its stores around the county with a sign declaring “this could be you!” Inverting astandard advertising appeal, it was not the blue suit or polka dot dress that was to bethe focal point of viewers’ identification. Rather, it was the mannequin as survivor,whose very existence seemed to illustrate that you could indeed “beat the a-bomb”as one civil defense film of the era promised. Invited to contemplate life within apostnuclear ruin as the docile mannequins of civil defense, the national audience forOperation Cue was caught in a sea of mixed messages about the power of the stateto control the bomb. This kind of ritual enactment did not resolve the problem ofthe bomb but, rather, focused citizens on emotional self-discipline through nuclearfear. It asked them to live on the knife’s edge of a psychotic contradiction—aneveryday life founded simultaneously in total threat and absolute normality—withthe stakes being nothing less that survival itself.

Indeed, although Operation Cue was billed at a test of “the things we use ineveryday life,” the full intent of the test was to nationalize nuclear fear and installa new civic understanding via the contemplation of mass destruction and death.Consider the narrative of Mr. Arthur F. Landstreet (the general manager of theHotel King Cotton in Memphis, TN) who volunteered to crouch down in a trenchat the Nevada Test Site about 10,000 feet from ground zero and experience thenuclear detonation in Operation Cue. After the explosion, he explained why itwas important for ordinary citizens to be tested on the front line of a nucleardetonation:

Apparently the reason for stationing civilians at Position Baker was to find outwhat the actual reaction from citizens who were not schooled in the atomicfield would be, and to get some idea of what the ordinary citizen might be ableto endure under similar conditions. This idea was part of the total pattern tocondition civilians for what they might be expected to experience in case ofatomic attack. . . . Every step of the bomb burst was explained over and overfrom the moment of the first flash of light until the devastating blast. We wereasked to make time tests from the trench to our jeeps. We did this time after

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time, endeavoring to create more speed and less loss of motion. We were toldthat this was necessary because, if the bomb exploded directly over us withpractically no wind, the fallout would drop immediately downward, and wewould be alerted to get out of the territory. We would have about 5 minutesto get at least 2.5 to 3 miles distant, so it was necessary that we learn everymove perfectly. [FCDA 1955:75]

The total pattern to condition civilians. Physical reactions to the nuclear explosion areprivileged in Mr. Lanstreet’s account, but a corollary project is also revealed, thatof training the participants not to think in a case of emergency but simply to act. Ifthe first project was an emotional management effort to familiarize citizens with theexploding bomb—to psychologically inoculate them against their own apocalypticimagination—the later effort sought simply to control those same bodies, to trainand time their response to official commands.16 The atomic bomb extended thedocility of the citizen–subject to new levels, as civil defense sought to absorb theeveryday within a new normative reality imbued with the potential for an imminentand total destruction.

This short-circuiting of the brain, and willingness to take orders under thesign of nuclear emergency, reveals the broader scope of the civil defense project:anesthetizing as well as protecting, producing docility as well as agency. Thiseffort to document the potentialities of life in a postnuclear environment met withalmost immediate resistance. In addition to the mounting scientific challenges tothe claims of civil defense, a “mothers against the bomb” movement started in1959 when two young mothers in New York refused to participate in OperationAlert by simply taking their children to Central Park rather than the fallout shelter(Garrison 2006:93–5). The widely publicized effects of radioactive fallout in the1950s as well as the move from atomic to thermonuclear weapons provided ampleevidence that Operation Cue was not, in the end, a “realistic” portrait of nuclearwarfare.17 And indeed by the time the Operation Cue film was rereleased in 1964,the following text was added to the introduction minimizing the claims of the film:

The nuclear device used was comparatively small. It had an explosive forceof 30 kilotons, equivalent to 30,000 tons of TNT. Whereas, some mod-ern thermonuclear weapons are in the 20-megaton range—twenty mil-lion tons—more than 600 times as powerful as the bomb shown here,and with a much wider radius of destruction. In this test, many of thestructures damaged by the 30-kiloton bomb were approximately one milefrom “ground zero.” With a 20–megaton blast, they probably would be

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obliterated, and comparable damage would occur out to a distance of at least8.5 or 9 miles.

They probably would be obliterated. Thus, as a scientific test of “everyday objects,”Operation Cue had less value over time, as the effects of blast and radiation inincreasingly powerful weapons rendered civil defense almost immediately obsoleteas a security concept. In Cold War ideology, however, the promise of nuclear ruinswas deployed by the state to secure the possibility of a postnuclear remainder, andwith it, the inevitable reconstitution of social order. The discourse of “obliteration”here, however, reveals the technoscientific limitations of that ideological project,as the destructive reality of thermonuclear warfare radically limits the possibilityof a postnuclear United States.

After the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, the visual effects of the bomb wereeliminated as atomic testing went underground. The elimination of abovegroundtests had two immediate effects: (1) it changed the terms of the public discourseabout the bomb, as the state no longer had to rationalize the constant production ofmushroom clouds and the related health concerns over radioactive fallout to U.S.citizens, and (2) it locked in place the visual record of the bomb. Thus, the visualrecord of the 1945–63 aboveground test program, with its deep implication inmanipulating public opinions and emotions, remains the visual record of the bombto this day. As science, Operation Cue was always questionable, but as nationaltheater it remains a much more productive enterprise: it created an idealizedconsumer dream space and fused it with the bomb, creating the very vocabularyfor thinking about the nuclear emergency that continues to inform U.S. politics(see Figure 4). Thus, the motto of Operation Cue “Survival Is Your Business”is not an ironic moment of atomic kitch, but rather reveals the formal projectof the nuclear state, underscoring the link between the production of threat,its militarized response, and the Cold War economic program. As an emotionalmanagement campaign, civil defense proved extraordinarily influential, installingwithin American national culture a set of ideas, images, and assumptions aboutnuclear weapons that continued to inform Cold War politics, and that remainpowerful to this day. I turn now to two afterimages of the 1950s civil defenseprogram, each set roughly a generation apart, to consider the lasting consequencesof this era’s emotional management strategy, and to explore the psychosocial effectsof deploying highly detailed depictions of the end of the nation-state as a means ofestablishing national community.

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AFTERIMAGE 1: THE DAY AFTER (1983)

The anticipation of nuclear war (dreaded as the fantasy, or phantasm, of aremainderless destruction) installs humanity—and through all sorts of relayseven defines the essence of modern humanity—in its rhetorical condition.

—Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now”

On Sunday, November 20th, 1983, 100 million Americans tuned in towatch the United States destroyed by Soviet ICBMs, and the few survivorsin Lawrence, Kansas, negotiate everyday life in a postnuclear environment(see Figure 5). Watched by half of the adult population in the United States,The Day After (directed by Nicholas Meyer) was a major cultural event, one thatrefocused public attention on the effects of radiation, mass casualties, and life with-out a functioning state. Presented as a “realistic” account, the blast and radiationeffects depicted in the film were supported by statements from health experts andtransformed into a moment of national dialogue about the physical and biologicaleffects of nuclear war (Rubin and Cummings 1989). Immediately following thebroadcast, the ABC network presented a roundtable discussion of the film andthe current state of nuclear emergency. Public school teachers across the coun-try advised students to watch The Day After to discuss its implications in class,thereby nationalizing the discussion. Even President Reagan, whose arms buildupand provocative nuclear rhetoric helped provoke the film, watched along with hisfellow Americans, announcing after the program aired that he too had been terri-fied by the filmic depiction of nuclear war. In synchronizing 100 million viewingsubjects, The Day After created a national community brought together by images oftheir own destruction. In doing so, it also replayed the official program of Opera-tion Cue with uncanny precision, and demonstrated the enduring national-culturallegacy of the 1950s emotional management project.

The Day After follows several “idealized” Midwestern families, documentingtheir lives before nuclear war breaks out and then in a postnuclear world. The firsthour of the film is devoted to everyday life in Lawrence (against the backdrop ofincreasing international tensions); the second hour is devoted to the brief nuclearattack and then life in a postnuclear environment. The film rehearses the lessonsof Operation Cue with eerie precision: after nuclear attack, the state is absentand it is up to citizens to step in to provide order, food, and medical care tosurvivors. The key difference between The Day After and Operation Cue has to dowith the nature of “survival.” Cue argued that life was possible after nuclear attackand promoted an idea that nuclear war was simply another form of everyday risk

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FIGURE 5. Soviet nuclear attack in The Day After.

(alongside weather, fire, and traffic accidents), whereas The Day After questionedwhether life was worth living after nuclear war.18 The central protagonist of thestory, a medical doctor played by Jason Robards, is left in the final scene dyingof radiation sickness, collapsed in what might be the ruins of his former home,his wife and children dead from the attack. No triumphal narrative of survival andreinvention here. Instead, the final moment of the film issues yet another warning:

The catastrophic events you have witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severethan the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclearstrike against the United States. It is hoped that the images of this film willinspire the nations of this earth, their peoples and leaders, to find the meansto avert the fateful day.

Thus, the “realism” of The Day After is revealed in the end to be adeception—just as it was in the Operation Cue film a generation earlier—as thefilmmakers are forced to admit that the horror of nuclear war is ultimatelyunrepresentable.

The simulated realism of the film perfectly illustrates Derrida’s (1984) claimthat nuclear war is “fabulously textual” because until it happens it can only beimagined and once it happens it marks the end of the human archive. As the only

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“remainderless event,” nuclear war is thus in the realm of the sublime, ungraspableand subject only to displacements, compensations, and misrecognitions. Thus, byrehearsing nuclear war in the imagination or via civil defense, one does not masterthe event or its aftermath. Rather, one domesticates an image of a postnuclearworld that “stands in” for the inevitable failure of the imagination to be able toconceive of the end. This postnuclear imagination is necessarily an arena of culturalwork, as early Cold War officials immediately recognized, one that promotes anidea of order out of the sublime and often becomes a space of pure ideology. Tothis end, the consistency of the nuclear tropes presented in The Day After, as well asthe nationalization of the televised event, document the multigenerational powerof nuclear ruins in the American imaginary. For a full generation after OperationCue, filmmakers could rehearse with startling specificity the entire 1950s programof civil defense, and provoke a national conversation about life after nuclear war.The state was no longer needed to enact this national melodrama of destruction,its terms were already installed in American culture and simply subject to citationand repositioning. The entertainment industry could now provide the firestormand fallout as “special effects,” rehearsing the lessons of nuclear crisis that a livetelevision audience first experienced in 1955 via a real atomic bomb. This time,however, the ruins were engineered not to “emotionally inoculate” Americans tonuclear war but, rather, to shock them into action during the nuclear emergencyof the early 1980s.

Put differently, in response to the Reagan administration’s escalating arms raceand talk of “winnable” nuclear wars (see Sheer 1982) was a cultural return to theimages and logics of Operation Cue, mobilized this time as a call to political actionrather than normalization. Thus, although the form and content of cinematic nucleardestruction remains unchanged from 1955 to 1983, its emotional project has beeninverted from promoting the docility of the citizen–subject to mobilizing a nationalcommunity before the bombs fall. The Day After reenacted the national melodramaarticulated in Operation Cue 28 years earlier with remarkable precision; however, itdid so not to produce a “bomb proof” society but, rather, as a de facto form of nuclearcritique. Similarly, activist groups (including Physicians for Social Responsibilityand FREEZE) used depictions of nuclear warfare—including the targeting and blastdamage maps of U.S. cities, and medical analyses of radiation injuries—to counterthe escalating military budgets and nuclear tensions of the late Cold War.19 Inother words, the calibration of the emotional management project was no longercontrolled solely by the government, allowing counterformulations using the sametexts and images that originally enabled the Cold War cultural project. Nuclear

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ruins are revealed here to be the very grammar of nuclear discourse in the UnitedStates—enabling both pronuclear and antinuclear projects—inevitably deployed toarticulate the affective terms of national belonging. For despite its implicit nuclearcritique, The Day After continues to mobilize a nuclear-bombed United States asa call to American community rather than as a marker of the end of sociabilityitself.

AFTERIMAGE 2: ARMAGEDDON/DEEP IMPACT (1998)

There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true stateof material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to bedescribed. The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experiencedby the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind oftaboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that could not even be privatelyacknowledged.

—W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

Questioning the near-total silence in German literature about everyday lifein the bombed-out ruins of World War II, W. G. Sebald finds an “extraordinaryfaculty for self-anesthesia shown by a community that seemed to have emerged froma war of annihilation without any signs of psychological impairment” (2004:11).He attributes this absence of commentary (about life in the ruins of Dresden andother German cities that were firebombed) to a collective understanding that itwas Germany who pioneered mass bombing years earlier in Guernica, Warsaw,and Belgrade (Sebald 2004:104). Thus, the national repression he interrogates isdoubled—that of life in the postwar ruins and that of a prior position as massbomber—linking trauma and destruction as part of the same psychosocial legacy. Isuggest that the United States—a country that did not experience mass bombing inWorld War II but did conduct it using both conventional and nuclear weapons—took an opposite national-cultural route in the Cold War. For although nuclearwar did not occur, rather than repress the bomb, American culture proliferatedits meaning and influence. The bomb became an intimate part of U.S. popularand political culture, a set of ideas, images, and institutions, installed in the 1950sthat soon functioned outside the direct control of the national security state (e.g.,see Brians 2006; Evans 1998; Sontag 1966). In other words, we live today in theworld made by the Cold War, a global project that engineered everyday life—andlife itself—around the technological means of apocalyptic destruction (see Masco2006).

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What are we to make, for example, of the Hollywood films of the 1990s—thefirst period in the nuclear age in which U.S. national security was not structuredin relationship to a nuclear armed, external enemy—which nonetheless repeti-tively enacts the destruction of the nation on film? Although Americans no longerdetonate atomic bombs on fabricated cities populated with mannequins, they doproduce yearly spectacles in which U.S. cities are reduced to smoldering ruins allin the name of fun. The Hollywood blockbuster—with its fearsome life-endingasteroids, aliens, earthquakes, floods, and wars—allows Americans to rehearsedestruction of their nation-state much as their parents and grandparents did inthe 1950s and 1980s. These yearly technoaesthetic displays of finely rendered de-struction are a unique form of American expressive culture. Only U.S. cinemadeploys the cutting edge technological achievements of computer-generated im-agery to visualize the destruction of its cities, and does so with such fetishisticglee.20

Consider 1998, a year that the United States was cinematically attacked twiceby asteroids—in Armageddon (directed by Michael Bay) and Deep Impact (directedby Mimi Leder)—the second and eighth most successful films of the year at the boxoffice. In both cases, life on earth is threatened from outer space and only savedin the last minute by the heroics of Americans armed with nuclear weapons (seeFigures 6–7). Armageddon uses the threat to the planet as a vehicle for resuscitatingworking-class masculinity as protectors of the nation–planet (as oil riggers aresent via the space shuttle to destroy the asteroid with atomic bombs), whereasDeep Impact is a study of civil defense and individual sacrifice right out of Operation

Cue. In both cases, what is striking is that the destruction of the United Statesis presented as a form of entertainment and redemptive play. Part of a seriesof summer films in the 1990s that rehearse the destruction of the United Statesand demonstrate the necessity of U.S. nuclear weapons, I think we have to readthis as a moment of psychic and cultural release from the Cold War arms race(cf. Rogin 1998, Davis 2001, and Mellor 2007). In the 1990s, Hollywood couldwork out the details of nuclear war (and various allegorized nuclear threats) withnew computer generated precision—precisely because nuclear terror no longerhad the meaning it had for a previous generation. In the immediate post–ColdWar moment, life, in other words, did not hang so oppressively in the nuclearbalance, and thus the cinematic imagination was freed to explore the end of theUnited States in a new way. Cold War nuclear cinema always had a moral pointto make about the nuclear state of emergency: nuclear war was not only alwaysmarked as an object of distinct seriousness but the detonation of the bomb was

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FIGURE 6. New York under attack in Armageddon.

FIGURE 7. New York under attack in Deep Impact.

marked as a political–ethical–technological failure of the Cold War system. Instriking contrast, post–Cold War films have no purpose other than patriotismand pleasure; they seek to reinstall American identity through mass violence,suggesting that it is only threat and reactions to threat that can create nationalcommunity.21

Regardless of its form (asteroids, or tsunamis, or alien invaders), these apoc-alyptic spectacles function as nuclear texts because they use mass destruction asa means of mobilizing the United States as a global superpower. As allegories ofnuclear war, they both reproduce the emotional language of nuclear threat (massdeath as a vehicle for establishing national community) and allow a productivemisrecognition of its political content. This filmic genre also inevitably reinforcesthrough aestheticized politics the ever-present need for war, and the ubiquity of

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external enemies with apocalyptic power. And in doing so, these texts relegitimizethe need for nuclear weapons in the United States while offering an image of theUnited States as a reluctant superpower forced into global military action for thegreater good. As a maelstrom of meteorites devastate New York in Armageddon, forexample, a taxi driver yells to no one in particular: “We at war! Saddam Hussein isbombing us!” This scene from 1998 prefigures the Bush administration’s successful(but fabricated) effort to link the terrorist attacks on New York and Washingtonin 2001 to the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. Naming the enemy in thisway (as science fiction or state propaganda) underscores the ideological alignmentbetween the Hollywood blockbuster and the U.S. military, which both rely onrehearsing threat as a means of stabilizing their industries.22 Cinematic viewers, asBenjamin saw so early on (1969), experience such ideological projects in a state ofdistraction, allowing both the covert habituation of ideas and a broader aestheti-cizing of politics in support of increasing militarization and war (see also Sontag1966).

One afterimage of the Cold War emotional management campaign is foundin this continued commitment to, and pleasure in, making nuclear ruins, andthen searching the wreckage for signs about the collective future. The nuclearlogics of the Cold War continue to haunt American society, informing howindividuals experience acts of mass violence and how the federal governmentthen engages the world. Nuclear cinema in the 1990s transforms anonymous massdeath into a vehicle for individuals to demonstrate their moral character and forthe nation to be regenerated through apocalyptic threat. Indeed, the pleasure ofpost–Cold War nuclear cinema is precisely in witnessing the destruction of theUnited States, and then walking out of the theater into the unbroken world. Unlikeviewers of Operation Cue in 1955 or The Day After in 1983, the viewers of Armageddon

and Deep Impact were not addressed as citizens that needed to demonstrate theircivic virtue by performing nuclear fear. Rather, the emotional management strat-egy was transformed into a form of post-traumatic play, with the destruction ofthe nation now presented as a diversion rather than a serious threat or opportunityfor political mobilization. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize the remarkablecoherence of the nuclear images from 1955 to 1998 to see the long-term effects ofthe Cold War emotional management strategy. It is also important to interrogatethe long-term national cultural effects of rehearsing mass violence in this manner,of repetitively producing images of destroyed U.S. cities to constitute both pleasureand national community.

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EPILOGUE

Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smokinggun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

President George W. Bush, address to thenation on Iraq on October 7, 2002

Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age.

President Musharraf of Pakistan, reporting on a message delivered to him fromthe U.S. State Department immediately after 9/11

Reclaiming the emotional history of the atomic bomb is crucial today, asnuclear fear has been amplified to enable a variety of political projects at preciselythe moment American memory of the bomb has become impossibly blurred. Inthe United States, nuclear fear has recently been used to justify preemptive warand unlimited domestic surveillance, a worldwide system of secret prisons, andthe practices of rendition, torture, and assassination. But what today do Americansactually know or remember about the bomb? We live not in the ruins produced bySoviet ICBMs but, rather, in the emotional ruins of the Cold War as an intellectualand social project. The half-century-long project to install and articulate the nationthrough contemplating its violent end has colonized the present. The terrorist at-tacks on New York and Washington, D.C., in 2001 may have produced a politicalconsensus that “the Cold War is over” and a formal declaration of a counterterrorismproject.23 But American reactions to those attacks were structured by a multigen-erational state project to harness the fear of mass death to divergent political andmilitary industrial agendas.

By evoking the image of the mushroom cloud to enable the invasion ofIraq, Bush appealed directly to citizens’ nuclear fear, a cultural product of thevery Cold War nuclear standoff he formally disavowed in inaugurating the newcounterterrorist state. The mushroom-cloud imagery, as well as the totalizing im-mediacy of the threat in his presentation, worked to redeploy a cultural mem-ory of apocalyptic nuclear threat (established during the four decades of theSoviet–American nuclear arms race) as part of the new “war on terror.” The newcolor-coded terrorist warning system (first proposed by Project East River in 1952 todeal with Soviet bombers), as well as the more recent transformation of shampoobottles on planes into a totalizing threat by the Homeland Security Administration,are official efforts to install and regulate fear in everyday life.24 In this regard, the“war on terror” has been conducted largely as an emotional management campaign

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in the United States, using the tropes and logics developed during the early ColdWar to enable a new kind of U.S. geopolitical project. The “war on terror” redirectsbut also reiterates the American assumptions about mass violence and democracyI have explored in this essay.

If the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.,felt strangely familiar to many U.S. citizens, it was because American society hasbeen imaginatively rehearsing the destruction of these cities for over three genera-tions: in the civil defense campaigns of the early and late Cold War, as well as theHollywood blockbusters of the 1990s, which destroyed these cities each summerwith increasing nuance and detail. The genealogy of this form of entertainment istraumatic, it goes back to the specific way in which the United States entered thenuclear age with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the specificpropaganda campaigns informing nuclear threat throughout the Cold War. Indeed,the ease with which the September 11, 2001, attacks were nationalized as part ofa nuclear discourse by the Bush administration has much to do with this legacy(see Kaplan 2003). Not coincidentally, the two graphic measures of nuclear blastdamage most frequently used during the Cold War were the Pentagon and theNew York City skyline (cf. Eden 2004). Figures 8 and 9, for example, are takenfrom the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission campaign to document the size of thefirst U.S. hydrogen bomb test from 1952. Fourteen true-to-scale versions of thePentagon (identified by the AEC as the largest building in the world) are placedinside the blast crater (the former Elugelab Island) to document its size, while theNew York skyline is used to demonstrate the vast horizontal and vertical scopeof the detonation. The events of 9/11 were easily nationalized and transformedinto a nuclear discourse precisely because our security culture has imagined andrehearsed attacks on Washington and New York for generations, and because thespecific symbols in the attacks (the Pentagon and the tallest building in the New Yorkskyline) were also used by the nuclear state for three generations as part of its emo-tional management strategy. The Bush administration, in other words, mobilizeda well-established logic of nuclear attack to pursue its policy objectives, translatingdiscrete, nonnuclear threats into the emotional equivalent of the Cold War nuclearcrisis.

For a nation that constructs itself via discourses of ruination, it should not bea surprise to see the exportation of ruins on a global scale. As President Musharrafclearly understood, the “with us or against us” logic of the Bush administration in2001 left no ambiguity about the costs of Pakistan not aligning with the sole globalsuperpower. The threat to reduce Pakistan to the “Stone Age” is the alternative,

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FIGURE 8. Before and after images of the first U.S. hydrogen bomb explosion, with pentagonsin blast crater (U.S. National Archive Photograph).

international deployment of nuclear fear, constituting a U.S. promise to reduce hiscountry to a prenational, pretechnological state. Thus, the United States enters the21st century as a nation both fascinated and traumatized by nuclear ruins. It trans-forms real and imagined mass death into a nationalized space, and supports a politicalculture that believes bombing campaigns can produce democracy abroad. It is si-multaneously terrorized by nuclear weapons and threatens to use them. The U.S.military both wages preemptive war over nascent “WMD” programs and is prepar-ing to build a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons.25 American society is todayneither “atomic bomb proof” nor capable of engaging nuclear technologies as a global

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FIGURE 9. Blast radius of the first U.S. hydrogen bomb explosion set against the New Yorkskyline (U.S. National Archive Photograph).

problem of governance. Instead, U.S. citizens live today in the emotional residuesof the Cold War nuclear arms race, which can only address them as fearful docilebodies. Thus, even in the 21st century, Americans remain caught between terrorand fear, trapped in the psychosocial space defined by the once and future promiseof nuclear ruins.

ABSTRACTIn this article, I interrogate the national cultural work performed by the mass circulationof images of a nuclear-bombed United States since 1945. It argues that the productionof negative affect has become a central arena of nation-building in the nuclear age, andtracks the visual deployment of nuclear fear on film from the early Cold War project ofcivil defense through the “war on terror.” It argues that the production and managementof negative affect remains a central tool of the national security state, and demonstratesthe primary role the atomic bomb plays in the United States as a means of militarizingeveryday life and justifying war.

Keywords: ruins, affect, nuclear age, security state, war, visual culture, film

NOTES

Acknowledgments. Research for this article was enabled by a Research and Writing Grant fromthe John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. I am grateful to Ann Stoler for her invitationto participate in this volume, as well as for her intellectual engagement. Many thanks to Mike Fortunand Kim Fortun for their editorial care, and to Shawn Smith for her critical readings of this article.

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1. The United States conducted 1,054 nuclear detonations (in addition to bombing Hiroshima andNagasaki) between 1945 and 1992, with 928 explosions conducted at the Nevada Test Site. Onthe global health effects of this program see Miller (1986), Makhijani and colleagues (1995),Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (1996), Makhijani and Schwartz(1998), and Masco (2006).

2. See Keeney (2002), and Office of Technology Assessment (1980) for damage assessments ofa potential Soviet nuclear strike on the United States.

3. My understanding of photographic “afterimages” has been developed in conversation withShawn Michelle Smith (1999).

4. For a detailed discussion of Walter Benjamin’s approach to the politics of visual culture, seeBuck-Morss (1991), as well as her reading of Soviet art in the years before the Cold War(2000).

5. On the constitution of the Cold War state, see Friedberg (2000), Leslie (1993), Schwartz(1998), and Gaddis (1982).

6. For the NSC 68 document, as well as detailed commentary, see May (1993); for criticalanalysis see Brands (1989); and for a review of the concept of “containment,” see Gaddis(1982).

7. For historical and cultural analysis of the U.S. civil defense programs during the Cold War,see Oakes (1994), McEnaney (2000), Garrison (2006), George (2003), Grossman (2001),Krugler (2006), and Scheiback (2003).

8. The Panel on the Human Effects of Nuclear Weapons Development (1956) imagined a Sovietattack in 1959 in which 90 major cities were destroyed and 50 million killed. It concludes: “Inthe event of a massive nuclear attack on the United States, of the proportions assumed above,without drastically improved preparation of the people, support of the National Governmentand of the war effort would be in jeopardy, and national disintegration might well result”(Panel on the Human Effects of Nuclear Weapons Development 1956:9). The human effectspanel then argued that the problem was how to incorporate the possibility of a Soviet sneakattack into the “feelings” of citizens, allowing atomic warfare to be naturalized as part of theeveryday world (see Vandercook 1986). One could productively compare the early ColdWar studies to recent studies of nuclear attack: see Charles Meade and Roger C. MolanderConsidering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack (2006, RAND Corporation), for example,which models a 10-kiloton nuclear explosion in Los Angeles. The RAND study concludesthat the effects of the blast would overwhelm all services and render a $1 trillion blow to theU.S. economy.

9. Val Peterson, the first director of the FCDA, described the media campaign for atomic civildefense as “the greatest mass educational effort” in U.S. history (Garrison 2006:36). In thisregard, the civil defense program was also a laboratory for exploring how to mobilize andcontrol a mass society.

10. See Braw (1997) and Weller (2006), and also the 2006 documentary film, White Light, BlackRain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (directed by Steven Okazaki), which details thehistory of censorship, and presents some of the once-prohibited film footage.

11. Grossman (2001:47) has underscored how governmental, media, and industry communicationexplicitly sought to harmonize their civil defense messages, providing a reinforcing series ofmessage across the media spectrum. This worked both to reinforce the civil defense projectand to reduce the opportunities for critique; see also Keever (2004), Scheiback (2003), andRojecki (1999).

12. See Oakes (1994), McEnaney (2000), and Davis (2002).13. For a history of the antinuclear movement see, Rojecki (1999), Katz (1986), as well as

Wittner (1993, 1997, 2003).14. Garrison (2006) argues that the civil defense programs of the Cold War should be judged a

failure because no nationwide system of shelters was ever built. I would argue that the projectof civil defense was not about building a new urban infrastructure but, rather, an emotionalone. To this end, the utilization of the civil defense was much more successful, installing aset of ideas and images about nuclear warfare that maintained public support for the nuclear

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state through the end of the Cold War and provided a set of ideological resources that theBush administration relied on to initiate its “war on terror.”

15. See Garrison (2006:94–96) on the Mother’s Protest against the Civil Defense Project,and Laura McEnaney’s (2000) extensive conversation about the role of women and themilitarization of the home, as well as May (1990) on the domestic version of “containment,”and Scheiback (2003) on the effects of civil defense on youth culture. See Cohn (1987) for adiscussion of gender in the language of Cold War defense intellectuals, and Orr (2006) for aremarkable study of “panic” in Cold War psychology and nation-building.

16. This project to test the cognitive effects of witnessing an exploding atomic bomb on citizenswas a small part of a larger military project, which involved thousands of troops at the NevadaTest Site. Over a series of above ground tests, soldiers were involved in “atomic warfare”exercises. They were also tested for the cognitive effects of being exposed to the visual imageof the blast. In some cases, this involved simple cognitive drills administered minutes after theexplosion or timing basic military activities, like dismantling and reassembling a rifle. Thus,across a wide spectrum of public and military projects, the national security state was testingthe limits of participation, and conditioning emotions and bodies to the atomic bomb.

17. On the politics of atmospheric fallout during above ground nuclear testing, see Masco (2006),Miller (1986), Hewlett and Holl (1989), Wang (1999), Kraus and colleagues (1963), Bentzand colleagues (1957), and Makhijani and Schwartz (1998).

18. Indeed, one of the most powerful voices in the renewed antinuclear movement of the 1980swas Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), which devoted its energies to publicizing thehealth effects of nuclear war by offering detailed descriptions of probable attacks on U.S.cities. For its public health campaign against nuclear war, PSR won the Nobel Peace Prize.PSR used, in other words, the same elements of the civil defense campaigns of the 1950s butprovided more detailed information about radiation injury and casualty figures, to mobilizeresistance to the renewed nuclear project of the Reagan administration, see Forrow and Sidel(1998).

19. In response to the FREEZE movement, the Reagan administration pursued a new emotionalmanagement strategy in the form of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which promisedan end to the arms race by installing a system of space-based lasers to shoot down ICBMs, seeFitzGerald (2000). Although Reagan offered SDI to the public as a near-term technologicalfix to the nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union—a way out of the nuclear danger—itwas never a realistic proposal. Over 25 years and $100 billion later it has yet to hit a realworld target, but it has served the emotional needs of its constituency very well—allowingan aggressive pursuit of nuclear weapons technology and the militarization of space all thewhile praising the goal of disarmament. The Day After, the FREEZE Movement, and SDI wereall in various ways emotional management campaigns that drew on the images of nucleardestruction produced during the aboveground testing regime to mobilize a response to thenuclear crisis of the 1980s. Rather than moving past Operation Cue, each of these projectredeployed the strategies of the early Cold War state to enable their political projects: activistsworking for disarmament, and the state working to maintain support for the Cold War armsrace.

20. The destruction of cities is a recurring theme in the nuclear cinema of Japan but is notmobilized as part of a militarized nation-building campaign as it is in the United States,see Broderick (1996). I would also note that there is a fundamental difference between the“disaster movie” and nuclear cinema in the United States. The disaster film uses destruction as ameans of establishing drama at an individual level, whereas nuclear cinema always nationalizesits content via a friend–enemy configuration. Thus, although a disaster movie has heroicindividuals, the ultimate project of nuclear cinema is to establish and mobilize a nationalcommunity through mass violence. For critical analysis of nuclear cinema, see Evans (1998)and Sontag (1966); see Taylor (1997) on nuclear photography; and see Virilio (1989) on warand perception.

21. On the politics of regeneration through violence in the United States, see Slotkin (1996), aswell as Rogin (1987, 1998).

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22. Armageddon, for example, was supported by NASA, as well as the Department of Defense,which allowed producer Jerry Bruckheimer to film on location in military installations inexchange for script changes that favored the Armed Services. See Robb (2004:94–95) for adiscussion of the changes to the film script made in exchange for support from the Pentagon.See also Rogin (1987) for studies in Cold War cinema, and his detailed reading (1998) of themilitarized gender and race politics in the 1996 film Independence Day.

23. The Bush administration doctrine of preemptive war (United States of America 2002) formallyended the Cold War doctrines of containment and deterrence that had defined U.S. foreignpolicy since the 1950s, see Gaddis (1982).

24. In August 2006, after British authorities broke up a terrorist plot to smuggle explosivechemicals onto an airline, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) raised thethreat level to its highest point “red,” and the Transportation Security Administration(TSA) banned fluids from domestic U.S. flights. The British plot was in the very earlydiscussion phase and not a viable threat to passenger safety, yet the response fromDHS and TSA was total; see the transcript of the August 10, 2006, press conferenceby Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales,FBI director Robert Mueller, and Assistant Security for TSA Kip Hawley, available athttp://www.tsa.gov/press/speeches/dhs_press_conference_08102006.shtm, accessedNovember 15, 2007. This total response to a fantasy threat does not make sense asa security strategy, but is an excellent illustration of the mobilization of affect, aswell as the demand for public docility that support the “war on terror.” For expertsecurity analysis of British and American reactions to the liquid explosive “plot,” seehttp://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Sources_August_Terror_Plot_Fiction_Underscoring_0918.html, accessed November 15, 2007; see also http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/08/details_on_the_1.html, accessed November 15, 2007.

25. In fall 2006, under directives from the Bush administration, Los Alamos National Lab-oratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory submitted to the Department ofEnergy their first new nuclear weapons designs since the end of the Cold War. Thisis the first major step toward a return to nuclear production, and perhaps under-ground nuclear testing. For a discussion of the larger post-2001 nuclear policy changes,see the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, available in excerpted form on the Internet athttp://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/policy/dod/npr.htm, accessed September 1,2007.

Editor’s Note: Cultural Anthropology has published many articles on U.S. culture andpolitics. See, for example, George Lipsitz’s 2006 article, “Learning from New Orleans:The Social Warrant of Hostile Privatism and Competitive Consumer Citizenship,” and alsohis 1986 article “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early NetworkTelevision Programs.” Also see Joseph Masco’s 2004 article “Mutant Ecologies: RadioactiveLife in Post–Cold War New Mexico.” A list of Cultural Anthropology articles focused on theUnited States can be accessed at http://culanth.org/?q = node/27.

Cultural Anthropology has also published extensively on media, culture, and politics.See, for example, Charles Brigg’s recent article “Mediating Infanticide: Theorizing Relationsbetween Narrative and Violence” (2007), Paul Manning’s “Rose-Colored Glasses? ColorRevolutions and Cartoon Chaos in Postsocialist Georgia” (2007), and Laura Kunreuther’s“Technologies of the Voice: FM Radio, Telephone, and Nepali Diaspora in Kathmandu”(2006). A list of CA articles on media can be accessed at http://culanth.org/?q = node/19.

Cultural Anthropology has also published prior articles relating to cultural politics. Seearticles like Kim Fortun’s “Cultural Critique in and of American Culture” (2006), RittyLukose’s “Empty Citizenship: Protesting Politics in the Era of Globalization” (2005), and ClareIgnatowski’s “Multipartyism and Nostalgia for the Unified Past: Discourses of Democracy ina Dance Association in Cameroon” (2004).

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Joseph Masco - Survival is Your Business-1